Horseclans' Odyssey

8

At Hwahruhn’s brusque command, both boys shed their worn and ragged garments. Then the two traders stood by holding a pair of lamps high while the Ehleen “examined” his new purchases. Custuh seemed not to notice the manner in which their customer’s soft, beringed hands lingered upon the boys’ freckled flesh… but Hwahruhn did, and the sight sickened him.

“You kin see, Lord Urbahnos,” Custuh said, after a few minutes, “it ain’t a earthly thang wrong with the slaves. We’s treated ’em good and fed ’em good, too. They’s as hale as they wuz the day we ketched ’em, out awn the prairie. No worms, no sores, no pus in they eyes, no loose teeth, no runnin’ noses evun. We only carries quality stock, we does.”

Urbahnos made his decision quickly. The elder boy was nowhere near as pretty as the red-blond younger one. Too, the elder was already beginning to sprout genital hair—something which no sensitive Ehleen of sophisticated tastes could or would tolerate, had he the choice, in a love boy. Therefore, the younger would be fed to plumpness, clothed fittingly and sent upriver and across the mountains to Karaleenos and the noblemen whom Urbahnos had now convinced himself would see to the nullification of his unjust banishment. The elder would be Urbahnos’ plaything until he tired of him, at which juncture he would be sold—with luck, at a good profit—to a brothel keeper. The Ehleen also decided that the “education” of this new, blond, exciting love boy would commence this very night, as soon as he could tactfully rid himself of these two barbarians.

Urbahnos was not a mindspeaker. In all of the eastern Ehleen lands, telepathy was considered to be a form of witchcraft and was savagely persecuted by the established religion. Therefore he possessed no mindshield, and his every thought was crystal-clear to the powerful mind of his chosen victim, Bahb Steevuhnz. Though appalled and more than a little frightened at what he read in the roiling mind of his new, degenerate owner, Bahb kept his face carefully blank.

When Urbahnos had announced his satisfaction with the sale, he departed the strongroom, followed by the two traders. Custuh took the lamp he had held with him, but Hwahruhn hung his on a hook let into the wall over the door. “Now, you lads be careful not to knock this down, hear? I’ve seen bales of furs and hides flare up like so much oil, and with that rout going on belowstairs, nobody would likely hear your screams until you were both burned to flinders.” Then he just stood for a moment, eying the two naked boys. He seemed to want to say more, but then he snapped his mouth shut, turned on his heel and walked out, shaking his head between bowed shoulders.

When he could no longer hear footsteps beyond the locked door, Bahb once more turned to the now openable chest. He slowly raised the lid and expressed his delight in a single grunt. The lower section was filled with hornbows, each of them wrapped in waxed vellum sheets and packed into a horn-and-leather quiver along with a dozen arrows. Most of the bows were the plainer variety made by all the Horseclans for trade purposes, but the four topmost sets were finely carved and decorated in tooled leather cases marked with the totem animals of Clan Steevuhnz—the bows taken from them, their sister and their dead half-brother upon the day of their capture.

Nor was this all. The two Clan Steevuhnz sabers lay beside the hornbow sets, and in the tray hinged to the lid of the chest reposed the four Steevuhnz dirks and even the boot knives. Bahb immediately seized one of the latter and filled the empty sheath inside his right boot with it, then he began to dress himself, mindspeaking his younger brother the while.

“Don’t ask questions, my brother, just heed me. The black-hair who has bought us is like no man I have ever heard of. He cares nothing for females, but rather means to use me as an ordinary man would use a woman. And he means to send for me as soon as he is done with the traders, whom he despises for some reason. So I will not be here to help, though I will let you know what passes by mindspeak. “With this,”—the wiry boy slapped at his boottop—“I have no fear of the black-haired man, for he is clumsy and more than a little fat, nor does he seem to be overly strong, for all his size and height. So unless he has help, I doubt he can harm me.

Take a dirk and start cutting one of your blankets into Strips; spread the other out flat and I’ll roll the sabers and bows in it—that way you can lower them to the ground without damage to them or any noise. I’ll take another boot knife and you can take the other two. Then secure all four dirks to your belt. Here, I’ll put my belt and the saber slings in with the bows. “Just before you go out that window, after the roll of weapons is safe below, drag something to stand on to the door, take that lamp down and set fire to everything that will bum in this room. No, wait—drag everything you can manage in front of the door before you fire it. That way, maybe they won’t know so soon that we’re gone.”

Barely had the two boys dressed, tied and hidden the blanket full of weapons and gotten the chest closed and relocked than a big, tall, bald man with skin the color of an old saddle opened the door, pointed at Bahb and crooked a finger thrice.

“Our master summons you, boy. Come, or I’ll drag you.” Nahseer had been aware of Urbahnos’ unnatural vices as long as the Ehleen had owned him, and he secretly felt that, for all the fact he had been gelded, he still was more of a man than his owner had ever been. He had been revolted at the order to bring the boy to Urbahnos’ bedchamber, but it had been a matter of either obeying or hurrying the day When the devious Ehleen would sell him to the bargers… and he would seek his death, hoping to take as many other men as he could with him into that state.

In the great room below, seated across the dining table from the exultant Custuh, the trader, Hwahruhn, watched the big Zahrtohgahn warrior—still fully armed and obviously cold sober, a fact unusual in this serai full of drunken men—proceed along the upper walkway to the strongroom. unbar the door, lead forth the eldest boy and return with him to the suite of the Ehleen. Then Hwahruhn tore his gaze away, lifted his wine cup and drained it, hurriedly refilled and drained the second just as fast, then refilled again. Custuh looked up from his calculations and said, with a rotten-toothed grin, “Buddyroll, keep a-drinkin’ like thet an’ yew won’ be in no shape fer’t’ spin’ yore gol’,’t’morra in Pahdookahport.”

Hwahruhn felt the deathly danger so strongly now that it almost eclipsed his own soul-sickness and self-loathing. In that warm, noisy room, cold sweat trickled down his spine and hairs prickled wherever they grew on his body. Near madness glared from his eyes, and he bespoke Custuh in a voice pitched just loud enough for him alone to hear.

“You won’t be spending any of that blood money, Custuh, nor journeying to Pahdookahport. You’ll be dead by sunup. I’ve seen your body lying in its blood… with the head caved in.”

Custuh stared back at his partner and gulped. Then his ire rose above his sudden fear. He slammed a horny palm down on the tabletop, snarling, “Now, damn yew fer a big-mouthed fool, Hwahruhn. Yew knows how superstitious alia these here bastids is. Whut if some o’ ’em heered yew, huh? Ah knows it’s mosly yer likker a-talkin’, but they won’t. Iffen they all ups an’ meks tracks, come’t’middle o”t’night, whut we gon’ use fer wagoners come daybreak? ’Sides, ’t’bugtits’d likely steal us blin’, fboot.”

Urbahnos stood waiting impatiently by the door to his bedchamber, temples and groin throbbing with desire bred from his visual and tactile examinations of the two little boys. When, after what seemed centuries, Nahseer entered with die elder lad and stooped to examine him for weapons, his master snapped, “Enough, you dung-colored ape! I’ve just seen him bare and there are no weapons in that room he could have gotten at. Just bring him here to me. But don’t leave this room, you hear? Those rascally traders know that I have gold and jewels, and I don’t want my throat cut in my sleep.”

As his master took the slave boy’s arm and propelled him into the inner chamber, then closed and locked the door, Nahseer settled himself into the large, padded chair which Urbahnos himself had occupied during his dealings with the plains traders, awaiting developments.

The boy moved lightly and could probably be fast as a scalded cat if need be. Another might think the boy’s thinness to be all skin and bone, but Nahseer recognized the flat musculature and the wiry strength it portended. Even unarmed, that lad was likely a healthy fight for the master, for even sober he was fat, clumsy of movements and possessed of muscles near to the point of atrophy from lack of exercise. And the master was well into his second drunk of the day, the effects of the first still not fully dissipated. Nahseer smiled, thinking of the two little knives his sure fingers had detected beneath the felt of the lad’s boottops.

“Yes,” he whispered softly in his native tongue, “these next few minutes should prove most assuredly interesting.”

Within the great room of the serai, the riotous tumult raged at full fury as the wagoners and apprentice traders and the other men of the caravan celebrated the conclusion of yet another summer among the nomads. Several of the serai women had trooped in to sell their shopworn favors in alcoves about the room, the serai musicians—two fiddlers, a banjo, a guitar and a grizzled oldster who performed with hand drum or tambourine, as required—aided willingly (if somewhat off-key) by a drunken wagoner and his reedpipes played loud and lively runes, but were heard only by those closest to them in the general uproar. Portuh strolled through from time to time, seeing that the beer, ale and cider flowed freely and without stint, collecting his half from the serai whores and now and then stopping by to share a sip of wine with the morose Hwahruhn and the loud, perpetually grinning Custuh. Before long, Portuh, too, was grinning, for the traders and their men were putting down stupendous quantities of the various potables and his profit from the bill he would present ere they departed on the morrow would be most satisfying, even after the duke’s cut was removed. There had been one killing so far, a fair fight with foot-long dirks between two wagoners. But these things had a habit of occurring when lusty, violent men got drunk, so no one was surprised or upset, least of all Portuh. He just hoped that the sometime mates of the corpse, now lying out in one of the sheds, would decide to burn rather than simply bury him, for his profit would be higher on wood for a pyre than on the digging of a grave. Suddenly, above the raucous disorder, a shrill, womanish scream rang out from the direction of the Ehleen gentleman’s suite. Few of the men gave it any heed, but Trader Hwahruhn came to his unsteady feet so quickly and with such force that he overturned the solid hardwood bench and even set the heavy table teetering onto two legs, sending ewers, cups and mugs crashing to the floor. Turning, he staggered on unsteady legs toward the stairs, one hand clenched around the wire-wound hilt of his long, wide-bladed dirk. Custuh rushed after his partner, his every step making squishing noises from the liquor that had poured into his rolled-down boottops. Hwahruhn shook off the first hold that Custuh took on him, but then Custuh threw both brawny arms about the other trader’s body, pinning the arms, while shouting over a shoulder to the serai keeper.

“Goddammit, gimme a hand with ’im, heah? He’s drunk as a fuckin’ skunk an’ plumb loco’t’boot! We don’ stop him, he likely t’kill thet Ehleen up thar.” Portuh grimly reflected that putting paid to that particular bastard of a bag of eastern shit might just be a laudable achievement and would sit most kindly in his mind. Nonetheless, he did not care to have the rich and no doubt well-connected turd die in this serai, so he rushed to Custuh’s aid. Hwahruhn fought them silently and with every ounce of his considerable strength, until, finally, Portuh drew the small, lead-filled cosh from under his belt and fetched the drunken, berserk trader a practiced blow behind the ear. Hwahruhn dropped like a sack of meal, whereupon Portuh and Custuh bore his limp form out into the drizzle, bedded him down in his own, personal wagon and locked him in. In his drunken, self-recriminating mental haze, Hwahruhn had, of course, assumed that the scream of undiluted agony had been that of Bahb Steevuhnz. Nahseer, closer, knew better, even before his master began to shout. “Help’t Oh, please, no’t Help me, Nahseer, before this little bitch kills me!” A single heave of his thick-muscled shoulder ripped the fabric of the door’s top panel, and Nahseer reached in and drew the bolts, then swung the shattered portal wide.

The Lord Urbahnos, stark naked save for his finger and arm rings, crouched—trembling, whimpering and drooling in terror—at the head of the bed, seemingly unaware of a deep and earnestly bleeding slash down his left cheek. Both his hands were clutching frantically at his crotch. Dark-red blood poured between and over the beringed fingers to soak into the pillow beneath him. Bahb was still fully clad, although both shirt and trousers were torn and both sun-browned cheeks showed prints left by the fingers and rings of the hand that had slapped him. A short-bladed knife in each grubby hand, the fine steel of both blades clouded with blood, he had been engaged in stalking Urbahnos, even while he mindspoke both his brother and the mare in the serai stables. Upon Nahseer’s entrance, however, he leaped backward to place his back hard to the outer wall. “Brown man,” he hissed, holding one blade ready for defense and placing the point of the other just under the hinge of his jaw, “if you try to take me again for him, I’ll send myself to Wind… but I’ll take you with me, if I can. Beware I” Nahseer knew of a certainty that the spindly boy meant every word of it, and he loved him from that moment for his courage in the face of impossible odds—a barely pubescent boy pitted against an armored swordsman four times his size, and the lad with only two little knives.

“Take him alive!” shrieked Urbahnos. “When I’ve had my will of him, I want him tortured to death, slowly. He hurt me, Nahseer, the little bitch has injured me terribly.

“Well? Move on him, you ape, draw your sword, but hit him only with the flat or I’ll have out your eyes. Call the hired guards if you’re afraid of him, but take him.”

Nahseer gazed deeply into the bloodshot, teary, hate-filled eyes of his master. Rage lay in their black depths, rage compounded with pain and the still-fresh memory of cold, crawling terror. He knew that now his master would never sell him, not unless he had his tongue removed first More likely, the Ehleen would have him murdered soon after they returned to Pahdookahport so that the only living witnesses to Lord Urbahnos’ humiliation might be permanently silenced. Turning his gaze back to the boy, the sometime warrior of far-off Zahrtohgah saw a fellow warrior, for all his lack of size and his tender years. There was no hate in those blue-gray eyes, only a grim determination. The lad stood stock-still, his wiry body seemingly relaxed, but both daggers held steady and unwavering.

With a deep sigh, Nahseer drew his heavy dirk and advanced on Bahb. Behind him, Urbahnos shrilled, “If you kill him, I’ll have your wormy guts nailed to a post and you marched around it until you bleed to death, you whoreson!”

Drawn by the lights and the noise, all the caravansers who had been assigned to stable duty flitted through the misty drizzle into the warmth and clamorous hilarity of the great hall. All but two of the serai stablehands had soon joined them, “just for one or two pots of beer.”

Of the two regular hands remaining, the younger was suffering a griping of the guts, and the stables lay nearer to the jakes than did the main building. The other, a much older man, had shed his threadbare breeches and was trying to ease the pains of his arthritic knees by the tried-and-true method of covering the joints with piles of fresh, hot horse manure.

The younger man had just left on his third or fourth run toward the privy when one of the small, ugly prairie-bred mares began to move agitatedly in her shared stall, kicking and snorting. The-oldster, the pains just beginning to ease a bit, tried manfully to ignore the equine uproar. But when one, then another of the horses began to emulate the mare, he sighed and, grumbling curses, pulled himself to his feet and stumbled stiffly down the aisle between the rows of stalls.

“Dang half-broke ill ol’ nomad critter. Probly spooked by a goldurned rat, is all.”

He lifted down a hanging lantern and in the other hand took a grip on a yard-long billet of wood, good for either crushing a rat or dealing with an aggressive equine. At the mare’s stall—shared with another of her kind—he held the lantem high and leaned into the cubicle, his old eyes vainly searching the corners for sight of a scuttling rodent “Shitfire, anyhow!” he mumbled. “Thet dadgummed boy should oughta be here, a-doin’ this—his eyes is a hell of a sight sharper nor mine is.” Taking the stick under his lantern arm, he unlatched the lower half of the gate and swung it outward, but before he could take a single step or even re-grasp his protective club, Windswift was on him with flashing hooves and savaging teeth. Within seconds, he was forever freed of the aches of his arthritis. Nor, when he returned, did the younger hand live much longer. Windswift was a trained and veteran warhorse, and these were not the first twolegs she had slain. The dropped lantern, which had bounced into the stall, had eaten its own oiled-vellum covering, and little flames were beginning to lick out at the straw. Windswift quickly kicked and nudged fresh dung onto the device until she could sense no more flame and little heat It was not yet time for the stable to take fire.

She mindspoke Bahb Steevuhnz that her job was accomplished, then she and the other, younger mare set about freeing the other two Horseclans mares. Shortly, little Djoh Steevuhnz trotted in, four dirks at his belt and the bulky roll of the other weapons on his shoulder. There was scant need for actual speech; physical contact enhanced even his marginal telepathic abilities to the point that he could easily communicate with all four of the mares. He and Bahb had watched from their window as the various wagons were parked for the night, and so he had no trouble in finding those in which the richly decorated Clan Steevuhnz saddles had been stored. The kaks were too heavy for even a strong ten-year-old to lug back to the stables, but the yard lay empty of all humans save him and the rain and mist made visibility poor at best, so he simply bade the mares to come to him, dragged the gear onto the tailgate and from there heaved it onto the low backs of the small beasts, hopping down into the mud to cinch the straps.

Back in the dryness of the stable, the boy squeezed and wrung the water from his dripping hair, then unrolled the blanket and attached bowcase-quivers and sabers in their customary places on the saddles. The blanket he rerolled and lashed behind the saddle of his own mount, Mousebrown. Horseclansfolk seldom used bridles, except on untrained young stallions, for usually mindspeak and pressure of knee or hand were all that was necessary to guide this breed of equines, who were the partners rather than the chattels of the nomads. When all was in readiness, Windswift once more mind-spoke Bahb Steevuhnz. His reply was a surprise to them all, mares and boy alike. Within arm’s length of the crouching nomad boy, Nahseer flipped the dirk, grasping the broad blade between thumb and a knuckle. Smiling gently, he said, ‘Take this, my little brother—it will make for you a far better weapon. But give me in exchange one of the little knives you have used to such good advantage this night, for I too have a few old scores to wash out in the diseased blood of yonder perverted pig.”

After a brief silence he widened his smile and added, “And tell the minds outside to saddle and bridle a good, big horse for me. I admire the spirit of your plains stock but they are just too small for a man of my size.” Bahb’s eyes widened in surprise. He beamed, “You mind-speak, man with brown skin? You are that thing’s sworn man, are you not? If you knew of my planning, why did you not tell him? For what purpose do you wish to help me? If you try to do to me what he would have done, I warn you, I will serve you even as I served him.”

Nahseer shook his hairless head. “Brother mine, even when still I had my man-parts, I utilized them only in the ways that Ahlah intended, not in the unnatural nastinesses in which some infidels debase themselves.” He sighed deeply and aloud, then went on silently.

“And I am no one’s sworn man, my brother. I am the pig’s chattel, as much a slave as are you. And yes, I can converse mind-to-mind, sense the mind conversations of others and even sense the surface thoughts of those with whom I cannot converse. This talent I was born with; it is not uncommon among the upper castes of my people.

“Why did I not betray your conversations with those outside, why did I fail to inform yon black-haired pig that you bore the two little daggers in your boots? The answers are many and complex, my brother, and if Ahlah so wills it, we will have time and leisure to speak on these matters. But for now, I believe I smell smoke. I imagine that your former cell is blazing merrily by this time, and so I suggest that we put an end to affairs here and depart… quickly.” Warily, unsure whether or not to believe, Bahb took both of his little knives in his left hand and snatched the dirk from its profferer, then gingerly laid one of the blood-sticky short blades in the pink palm of the brown-skinned man.

Nahseer withdrew his sword from its case and leaned it against the wall near the boy, then turned and walked to the bedside of his sometime master. Because mindspeak took far less time than did oral communication, bare seconds had passed since Urbahnos had given the order to stun and capture his newest slave. “What are you doing, you dung-hued cretin?” the Ehleen rasped. “I’ll have you flayed and rolled in salt. I’ll—” Nahseer interrupted him. The big man’s voice was soft, but the undertone froze Urbahnos to his innermost being. “The only thing you will do now, sweet master, is to hold your flapping tongue… unless you had rather lose it, that is. You promised me my freedom whenever you returned to the east, you depraved beast of a liar, yet your true intent all the while was to sell me to the slow, living death of the row-barges.”

His teary eyes once more wide with terror, his thick lips atremble, the Lord Urbahnos shook his head wildly from side to side, sending a spray of bright blood from his slashed cheek in all directions. “No, Nahseer! No, no, no! You are to be freed, I swear it… my word of sacred honor… no, I…” The Zahrtohgahn sneered. “Dear master, we both know that your word is of less worth than a half dram of rat’s piss. The only thing in all the world that you hold sacred is profit As for honor, it surprises me that you even know and can pronounce the word in any language, since you so obviously have never possessed a scintilla of it.”

While speaking, Nahseer had used the little knife to cut down most of the bedside bell rope, then divide it into two equal lengths. After tucking the knife into the folds of his sash, he grabbed Urbahnos and jerked him suddenly onto his back on the rumpled, bloody bed. He seized first one arm, then the other and used the ropes to bind the Ehteen’s wrists to the bedhead, knotting them cruelly tight. Then he did the same for the ankles, lashing each to a bedpost with strips torn from the linen sheets. Several shorter strips went into a crude but effective gag. Then Nahseer stood back and surveyed his handiwork, while testing the edge of the boot knife on the callused ball of his thumb. To Bahb, he said, “Bring me the other little knife, please, my brother. That rope is tough and this one has lost the best of its cutting edge. And bring my sword, as well; this thing cannot grab at it now.” “What are you going to do to him?” asked Bahb curiously. “I mean to geld him,” stated Nahseer bluntly and aloud, his words setting Urbahnos to squinning and vainly jerking at his bonds, trying to force words and strangled screams through the fabric of his gag, his features almost livid and his eyes starting from their sockets.

Bahb handed back the Zahrtohgahn’s sword. Though he kept the dirk in his right hand and ready, he sheathed the dulled dagger. This will be the first time I’ve ever seen a man gelded. Is it the same as gelding a bull calf?” Nahseer nodded. “Much the same, my brother, much the same.” To Urbahnos, he said, “Master, think you back on how many times you have chided me because I have been deprived of the very man-parts you daily dishonor. Recall how often you have spoken to me and of me in public as ‘your Zahrtohgahn steer’ or ‘a creature of uncertain sex.’

“Now, I advise that you lie still, master, for this little knife is razor-sharp. The hilt is small and already slippery with your blood, and if you wiggle too much I might slip and take off your yard, as well. You wouldn’t like that, would you, my master?”

Nahseer did not believe in torture, and the movements of hand and knife were quick and sure. Presently he laid aside the blade, grasped a handful of Urbahnos’ black hair and raised his head that he might better see what the Zahrtohgahn’s other palm held—two bloody, kidney-shaped objects, the Ehleen’s testicles. Urbahnos stared, goggle-eyed, then the pupils rolled up and he fainted.

The big man tossed the testicles onto the coals of one of the braziers, stooped and rinsed his hands in the tub of cold bathwater still sitting in a corner, then turned back to the brazier. With the iron tongs that hung beneath the bowl, he poked around until he found a coal to his liking. Gripping this coal between the jaws of the tongs, he lifted it and carefully blew away as much as he could of the white ash, exposing the glowing, red-orange surface of the charcoal. Returning to the side of his unconscious victim, Nahseer used the fingers of his free hand to hold open the Ehleen’s scrotum—now empty of all save the taacked-off stumps of the vesicles and a large amount of blood—then dropped the red-hot, glowing coal directly into the sac. Lord Urbahnos revived, screaming through his gag, jerking and thrashing to the limits of his bonds, tears jetting from his eyes and mucus from his nostrils, fouling himself and the bed beneath him with the discharges of both bladder and rectum.

“Why didn’t you just let him lie there and bleed?” asked Bahb Steevuhnz. “He might have bled so much that he died, my brother,” said Nahseer. “And dead he would have robbed me of my vengeance, you see. No, I want him to live, to live in almost the same condition as have I for so many years. “Now, let us go into the outer room and gather such things as may aid us in our flight.”

The big man wrenched both lock and hasp from off his former master’s strongbox, scooped all the coins into the money belt and stowed it inside the breastplate of his cuirass. That done, he stuffed bread, cheese, cooked meats and dried fruits into one set of saddlebags, then filled another set with the metal flasks of brandies and cordials. For want of water, he filled a travel skin with the contents of two jugs of pear cider.

Nahseer knew that no matter how befuddled were those on the floor below, there would be questions were he to try to pass through laden with saddlebags, blankets, waterskins and cloaks and with the boy in his torn and blood-splashed garments.

“Brother warrior Bahb, speak you with your brother below, and ask if the yard between this place and the stables be still empty.” Aware that Djoh was ever difficult to range, Bahb instead bespoke the mare, Windswift, then replied, “All is well outside. One man came into the stables, but he was no warrior, and besides was so dizzy that he could hardly stand. My brother, Djoh, tripped him, jumped astride him and slipped a dirk blade between his ribs. Windswift says that no grown warrior could have done it more smoothly and effectively.”

Nahseer tore down the carpet that had been hung over the single small window, wrenched out the entire frame, then sliced one of the large floor carpets into strips, tied them to-gether, passed one end under Bahb’s arms and knotted it around his chest. Lifting the slender boy easily, the Zahrtohgahn put him through the opening feet foremost, then stepped up on the massive table he had pushed into place and lowered him to the muddy yard below. When he had lowered all the items he had decided would be helpful to them, he drew back the improvised rope, rehung the carpet and stepped down from the table.

In the bedchamber, he found that his sometime master had once more swooned. With the lord’s own jewel-encrusted dagger, he sliced the man’s bonds loose from the bed, then, wrinkling his nose and holding his breath against the thick reek of spilled blood, loose dung and burned meat, he pulled off the gag. Stepping into the corner, he lifted the tub full of cold water, turned back to the bed and flung the entire contents onto the unconscious man thereon. Urbahnos woke moaning, opened his mouth to scream. But the palm of Nahseer’s big hand pressed tightly over it, and the other hand held the slender dagger so that the Ehleen had no trouble seeing the keen edges and glittering point. “If you make one sound or try to leave this room, Lord Steer, I’ll return and complete the job; I’ll slice off your prick and stuff it down your throat!” So saying, he sheathed the dagger, thrust it in his sash and stalked out of the suite, then down the stairs. The smell of smoke was now very thick in the upper level, and Nahseer noted that the exposed rafters were all but obscured by layers of smoke.

What with stopping here and there for a word or two of light chatter with die tables of friendly drunks, now and then pretending to take drafts from proffered cups and mugs and leathern jacks, it took the Zahrtohgahn a good quarter hour to reach the vicinity of the big outer door. And there he was confronted with his first real danger.

Ehdee-Djoh Cawl, one of the bravos hired on for the trip by Lord Urbahnos, and far less besotted than most of the men in the main room, had followed Nahseer and confronted him in the relative dimness near the door. In his native, nasal twang, he said, “That thar knife in yore sayash, thet be yore massa’s. I seed it a-hangin’ fum oft his belt. He know yew got ‘er?” For all that where they stood was in almost utter darkness to those in the well-lighted room, Nahseer glanced pointedly back the way he bad come, and Cawl, too, turned his head. And that was when the Zahrtohgahn’s big fist struck the smaller man, knocking him senseless. In the middle of the yard stood four small and one large saddled equines, two of them with riders. Nahseer pulled up the tops of his jackboots, checked the girths and stirrup leathers of the biggest horse—a silver-gray gelding that had been the prized possession of the trader, Custuh—then swung into the saddle. Guided by the road, which they kept in sight, they rode eastward toward the Great River. But getting back across it would be another matter entirely. Wolf and his patrol had crossed the barrier of the bluffs and carefully picked their way along the rocky summits until they stood high over the beach—a real, shelving sand beach some eight hundred yards in length, but with real width for only something less than a hundred yards.

All along the way, Wolf had noted and marked on the maps favorably placed natural positions or places that might be easily and quickly improved upon to provide cover and concealment for units of archers and slingers to harry the advance of an enemy force marching inland from the river. Also, he had noted that a much narrower and precipitous track ran along the inland side of the bluffs, averaging twelve feet below the summit. When the maps had all been marked and annotated to his satisfaction, he left the patrol to build a fire and warm their rations, while he clambered down the landward side to the track below.

He found a small, low-ceilinged cave and mentally noted it as a good cache for supplies for men manning the bluffs. Proceeding on toward the higher, thicker stretch of bluffs, he kept his eyes peeled for more caves… and he found one, a much larger one, with its entrance almost concealed by replaced undergrowth and even sapling trees.

Thinking, as he pushed through the shrubbery concealing the entrance, that he might have chanced upon a smugglers’ hidey-hole, he loosened in its scabbard the broad-bladed infantry shortsword he favored and was about to do the same with his dirk when the cave mouth loomed before him, almost blocked by the bulk of a man of the Black Kingdoms, in helm and steel cuirass, armed with bared broadsword and dagger.